The New Yorker, April 30, 2018
How Michelle Wolf Blasted Open the Fictions of Journalism in the Age of
Trump
By Masha Gessen
On Saturday, the comedian Michelle Wolf, performing at the annual White
House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered the most
consequential monologue so far of the Donald Trump era. Some of the
attendees claimed to have walked out of the dinner in protest during the
performance; others, like the President’s press secretary, Sarah
Huckabee Sanders, have been lauded for remaining stoically in place in
the face of scathing humor. The tension of it all might have been too
much. The Times’ White House correspondent Peter Baker lamented on
Twitter, “I don’t think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight.”
Commentators wondered—not for the first time—whether the White House
Correspondents’ Association should discontinue the tradition of having
comedians perform at the function.
Wolf’s monologue—sharp, unflinching, and pointedly unfunny in
places—called bullshit on the role laughter has been performing in
Trump’s America. Over the last year and a half, much of the culture has
sought relief in humor in much the same way as citizens of extremely
repressive countries. Back in the early nineties, in her book “How We
Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” the Croatian writer Slavenka
Drakulić described laughter as the ultimate personal triumph over the
daily humiliations of life under Communist rule. In today’s Russia,
people make jokes about the fear Vladimir Putin inspires (he opens the
fridge and the jellied meat begins to quake, but he reassures it by
saying he is getting the yogurt) or the suicidal nature of Russian
foreign policy (we’ll retaliate against American sanctions by bombing
the Russian city of Voronezh), the same way that they used to joke about
Leonid Brezhnev’s inability to talk or stay awake during official
functions. Jokes serve a transparent purpose: they reclaim the power to
define—and inhabit—reality. They also reclaim the goodness of laughter,
for regimes weaponize laughter to mock their opponents, creating what
the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym called “totalitarian laughter.” Its
opposite is anti-totalitarian laughter.
I recognize laughter in the age of Trump as though it were a cousin of
anti-totalitarian laughter. It is the reaction to seeing act-based
reality, as when “Saturday Night Live” essentially reënacts White House
press conferences, or when late-night comedians offer up what amounts to
straightforward reportage and analysis. The hunger for a reflection of
reality is so desperate that, I have discovered repeatedly over the last
year and a half, one can reliably get laughs simply by quoting Trump
during a public talk.
Last month, Hillary Clinton got laughs and applause during her Arthur
Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, which concluded pen America’s annual
World Voices Festival, by merely referring to Trump’s lie about the size
of the crowd at his Inauguration (around the twenty-three-minute mark
here). There was nothing funny about any of it: not about the
President’s lies, nor about the grief that this had not been Clinton’s
Inauguration, nor about the fact that, speaking a year and a half after
her electoral loss, addressing the friendliest of all possible
audiences, Clinton was as stilted, scripted, and unapproachable as ever.
She was still campaigning, still losing, and there was no reason to laugh.
Political satire in less troubled times exaggerates existing facts,
pointing out the absurdities inherent in all ideologies, or playing up
smaller disagreements and failures for bigger laughs. But Trump is hard
to exaggerate—it is enough, it seems, merely to mirror him. But why does
faithful portrayal of fact-based reality elicit laughter in a country
that has a free press and a healthy public sphere in which, it seems,
reality is robustly represented? What do late-night comedians reclaim
from the Times?
Wolf’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner
suggests an answer. She called the President a racist, a truth as
self-evident as it has proved difficult for mainstream journalists to
state. Her humor was obscene: she joked about the President’s affair
with a porn star; about his “pulling out,” as promised (of the Paris
agreement); and about the G.O.P.’s former deputy finance chair Elliott
Broidy’s $1.6 million payoff to a former mistress. She also made minced
meat of White House staff, House and Senate Republican leaders, the
Democrats, and journalists on the right and left, in their presence or
in that of their colleagues.
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is a peculiar
institution. It brings together White House correspondents, other
members of the news media, and the people they cover: government
employees and elected officials. (In years past, though not so much in
the Trump era, it also attracted a gaggle of Hollywood celebrities.)
What makes these dinners possible are fictions about civility and
performance. There is a fiction that holds that journalists and their
subjects can eat and socialize together and yet maintain the distance
necessary to continue performing their professional roles. There is a
fiction that they can laugh at one another and themselves and not take
offense, that the divisions among guests are ultimately bridgeable, that
all of them inhabit the same reality, and that both the humor and the
objects of the humor are innocuous.
The same fiction continues to dominate our public sphere. In this story,
Trump performs the role of President, albeit poorly, and those in the
media maintain a strained civility in their coverage of him. In this
story, the statement that the President is a racist is still
controversial. In this story, the media can discuss his affair with a
porn star, and even the question of whether he used a condom, without
undermining respect for the office. This is an essential pretense,
because respect for the office of the President is indeed a value that
should transcend the current Presidency. But it is this pretense, and
these fictions, that cast a pall of unreality over most media coverage
and make late-night comedy shows the better news outlets. And then there
is the pretense that the late-night comedians exist in a parallel
universe, separate even from the television channels that broadcast them.
Wolf’s routine burst the bubbles of civility and performance, and of the
separation of media and comedy. It plunged the attendees into the
reality that is, in the Trump era, the stuff of comedy. Through her
obscene humor, Wolf exposed the obscenity of the fictions—and the
fundamental unfunniness of it all. Her last line, the most shocking of
her entire monologue, bears repeating: Flint still doesn’t have clean water.